I work in a lab that has “quads”. Basically there are large square sections with a person in each corner (with our backs to each other). Individual work areas are pretty large. We all have at least two computers with multiple monitors and aren’t crowded. There are a few rooms/offices available that would have an average of two people in them. I could have chosen one of those areas instead. At my last job I was in a cubicle.
There aren’t too many most of the time. When I get wrapped up in a problem, I become pretty oblivious to the world. I do have noise cancelling headphones though too and sometimes they come in handy. At my last job there were also “focus rooms,” which were small offices you could take over for a day if you really needed to be able to close a door and get some privacy.
Because of the specific nature of the work I do, I have to do almost all of it on an air gapped computer, so there isn’t usually much I can do from home. At my last job I worked from home sometimes and was even supplied with hardware to have a good remote workstation.
So part of the reason we’re working so closely is because one other developer and I are very new to the project and still require some adult supervision. Both this job and my last have been creating web-based user interfaces for hardware, replacing legacy installed software written in C++. For the particular challenge I’ve been working on for the last few days, we’ve been adding a new feature to this product. We’re doing it using technologies which are pretty new to all three of us (to varying degrees). As we’ve been trying to make our new feature work, we’ve found issues with it that have turned out to be larger issues with existing components, so we’ve had to address those as we’ve found them. This has also involved some UX decisions. Because we’re the first ones to do certain things in this UI, we’re setting the pattern for how the team will develop those things, which can involve lively debates. In this case we’re also working with new hardware, so we’ve had to go to hardware people, backend people, and other teams for troubleshooting and advice. Meanwhile, the other 6 people on my team have been working on other stuff for the same project.